Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944

by John C. McManus

With few vehicles, a nearly disastrous logistical situation, and little in front of him but trackless, alien jungle, he had essentially decided to unleash a strategic banzai attack.

Unlike some of his Imperial Army colleagues, whose irrational belief in the spiritual over the temporal almost made them tantamount to twentieth-century ghost dancers, Adachi was realistic enough to understand that he was unlikely to snuff out the enemy base at Aitape. Instead, he hoped to inflict heavy casualties on the Americans and force MacArthur to spend time and resources to maintain the security of the Allied eastern flank. This could ease pressure on Japanese formations in western New Guinea and all over the western Pacific, perhaps even delay or sabotage MacArthur’s plan to return to the Philippines.

air superiority, to put it briefly, we are about a century behind . . . America,” one bitter 41st Division officer scrawled in his diary. “If only we had air superiority!”

With the combat manpower equivalent of two full divisions in place, he authorized the formation of XI Corps under the command of Major General Charles “Chink” Hall, a strack Mississippian and West Pointer whose valorous combat service in World War I had earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.

The presence of the rugged Torricelli Mountains and miles of impassable jungle essentially protected

The feelings of every officer and man throughout the Army are churning with a desire to massacre all Americans and Australians.” Their capacity to endure continued hardship bordered on the inexplicable. Napoleon Bonaparte had once famously contended, “The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second. Hardship, poverty and want are the best school of the soldier.”

lone BAR man fired twenty-six magazines, some five hundred bullets, in a fifteen-minute period, until his overheated rifle rebelled and fired only single shots. In less than an hour, Adachi’s lead battalion was scythed from four hundred to ninety survivors, many of whom spent their last energy to crawl or run back across the river. The blood of their comrades turned the shallow water red and speckled the rocks of the riverbed. Many had been snared in coils of barbed wire above the riverbank and slaughtered. Still, throughout the night, the Japanese threw more battalions into the fray. Their losses were terrible. The 78th Infantry alone lost six hundred dead and one of its battalions suffered an 80 percent casualty rate. “We just mowed them down and filled that riverbed up,” one American soldier later commented.

They tore a two-thousand-yard gap in the American front, fanned out assaulting infiltrators in either direction,

“Our artillery has been right up behind the infantry supporting,” Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Yeo, an artillery commander in XI Corps, wrote to his father. “The batteries have been under attack at their positions and wire and observation parties have been attacked. The Jap is desperate.” In a single night, the Japanese suffered about three thousand casualties. So many of their bodies choked the riverbed that American observers who glimpsed them initially thought they were looking at piles of logs.

the eerie darkness, enemy soldiers called out the names of individual Americans with such pleas as “Smitty, help, I’m wounded. Come over and get me!” At times, they cursed President Roosevelt or his wife, Eleanor. The Americans responded with the most common insult of the Pacific War, “Tojo eats shit!”

Patrols fought to the death in the anonymous foliage. Japanese infiltrators harassed tense nighttime perimeters; as usual, the Americans eschewed night patrols, outposts, and listening posts and passively hunkered down, ceding night movement to their enemies. It was not unusual for a man to go more than a month without a change of clothes.

The Americans wordlessly shoveled dirt onto the grave and left. In a telling foreshadowing of the Vietnam War, commanders grew increasingly preoccupied with inflicting the highest possible number of deaths on the enemy for every American casualty—the popular term for this was “kill ratio”—an attitude present in the European theater but far more prevalent in the Pacific against a nonwhite enemy. In one press briefing, Willoughby emphasized that SWPA commanders were loath to “waste valuable Caucasian lives on Orientals, who prefer to die.” Lieutenant Colonel Yeo, the artillery commander, enthused in a July letter to his father that “everyone is in better spirits now that we are slugging it out with the Japs and keeping great ratio of killed and wounded in our favor, usually about 10 to 1.”

According to Japanese records, Adachi lost 10,000 men, including nearly an 80 percent fatality rate from disease or combat. Only 98 Japanese surrendered or were captured by the Americans. The casualties especially decimated the combat formations that contained Adachi’s best soldiers. For instance, all three infantry regiments of the 20th Division suffered more than a 50 percent loss rate. If anything, the “kill ratio” might have been even higher than Yeo’s claim of 10 to

Even as the Driniumor drama unfolded, the westward leapfrogging continued.

With a foothold along the Arare-Toem coastline, the American presence soon expanded to include more engineers, artillery, and antiaircraft units, plus another regimental combat team, the 158th, which landed in echelons from LCIs on May

Willoughby’s long-distance ignorance of Japanese capabilities was not necessarily surprising, even in spite of his Ultra advantage. Though adept at the collection of data and the study of history, he displayed, throughout the entire war, little understanding of how to analyze the more abstract notions of Japanese intentions and mindset. In all probability, these shortcomings stemmed from his overweening cultural arrogance against an Eastern foe.

The Americans did not have enough available landing craft to outflank Lone Tree Hill with an amphibious invasion, though they would draw some fire support from destroyers and small-grade resupply efforts from individual craft. A

Infused with racial hatred, burning with anger over Pearl Harbor and a slew of wartime atrocities, few of the American frontline soldiers felt any enthusiasm about the notion of taking Japanese prisoners. “To the average GI, the Jap is no more than a yellow rat,” Lieutenant Colonel William Shaw later candidly commented to an Army interviewer. “They have no use for them and just shoot them like anyone would kill a rattlesnake. They hunted the Japs like one would a deer, and shot them without mercy.”

“There was a stench that hung over that island that you wouldn’t believe,” PFC Allen Douglas, an engineer, later shuddered. “There were big blowflies all over the place; most all of the bodies were all bloated because a few days in that sun was all it took for the gases in your body to blow you up like a balloon.” Inured to squeamishness, some of the Americans plundered the remains with callous impunity, stripping them of valuables and flags and ripping out gold teeth. Some even strung the teeth together and wore them as grisly necklaces. The stink inside the confining, dank environment of the caves was especially noxious.

The stench was weighted to suffocation with filth, death, and corruption.” The smell was such that few Americans were willing to explore the caves. Lieutenant Paul Austin, a company commander in the 34th Infantry, later lamented that “the odor would knock you down.” He once came upon an enemy corpse wedged against a tree, “completely eaten up . . . covered with a million maggots and black bugs. It was a horrible sight.” Sergeant McCool found one dead Japanese in especially horrifying condition. “All around the top of his head, from eye level up, the maggots had cleaned the skin off, leaving his skull like a white billiard ball.”21

“There is a look on the faces of men who have borne the brunt of battle like nothing I have seen,” one officer wrote in a letter home. “But I shall never forget it as long as I live. Gaunt and drawn by fatigue and suffering, they stare straight ahead with the horror of men who have looked through the gates of hell.”

The rapid accumulation of tangible results provided a welcome silver lining for all these horrors. In a matter of just a few days, the I Corps commander and the soldiers in his charge succeeded in fulfilling the strategic objective of the Biak invasion.

The boys needed a kick in the pants and I had to give it to them.” Basically, the Japanese were much worse off and by attacking them so aggressively, Eichelberger had helped the entire task force appreciate this highly important point.

Driven as ever by the need for achievement and recognition, Eichelberger felt a tremendous sense of pride in what he had accomplished at Biak. He confided to Emma in a letter,

Before his arrival, the Americans “were using little nibbling attacks that would not have gotten any place.” In another missive, he ventured, “I think I have done fine thanks to profanity, flattery, offer of rewards, threats and Lady Luck.”

Krueger adhered to the philosophy that a job well done was an expectation, not a distinction. Upright

While relations deteriorated between MacArthur’s two key ground commanders, Doe’s task force finished off the Japanese at Biak, snuffing out the remnants of their garrison. By the time the last of the fighting petered out at the end of August, the Hurricane Task Force had suffered 9,790

What was more, no sooner had the Nhpum Ga drama played out, when the Japanese unleashed a massive effort that threatened to unhinge the entire Allied strategic position on the Asian continent. From the first moment of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese had deliberately chosen to fight a perilous two-front war—one against the Western powers in the Pacific and Asian rim and the other against the Chinese. Knowing that the tide of war had turned against them in the Pacific, the Japanese high command decided to turn up the pressure in China, where they enjoyed a qualitative military superiority over their enemies.

Ichi-go, in east

The Japanese intended to seize control of key railroads and airfields, forestall the possibility of American bombing raids on the home islands, establish land links to their bases in French Indochina, and perhaps even weaken Chiang’s government badly enough to knock China out of the war. With China neutralized, the Japanese could potentially apportion more resources to fight the Americans in the Pacific and perhaps force them to negotiate a settlement based on Japanese dominance in Asia and a new geopolitical balance of power.

Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party colleagues exulted over these people’s revolts and the damage the Japanese were inflicting on Chiang. “The CCP leadership rejoices at the news of the defeat,” Peter Vladimirov, a Soviet liaison officer embedded with Mao’s people in Yennan, told his diary.

On the morning of September 21, they heard the unmistakable sound of airplane engines. Prisoners looked up from their places of toil on the farm or poured out of their flimsy bamboo and thatched-roof barracks to see dozens of unfamiliar aircraft in the viewable distance, heading for points unknown. As the prisoners peered intently at the unfamiliar planes, they gradually came to realize that they were American, the first they had seen in two and a half years. Throughout the day, groups of these planes materialized in the skies over or near Cabanatuan. Though the prisoners could not know it, the aircraft were dive-bombers and fighters, originating from the decks of five separate fleet carriers belonging to Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet, to carry out the first missions designed to soften up Japanese defenses on Luzon and elsewhere.

The POWs did not have to know this to understand that their world had just changed. Excitement swept through the men like a tidal wave.

“What a day for the Americans who haven’t seen a friend for 30 months! It has sure boosted morale around here.”

For months, the Japanese had planned to move the American POWs from the Philippines to more secure spots in the empire. If they were liberated, Japan would suffer a propaganda disaster and an accompanying loss of prestige among peoples of the Pacific and Asia. Nor did the Japanese want tales of their horrendous mistreatment of the prisoners to circulate throughout America and the rest of the world. Plus, they wanted to continue to exploit the slave labor of the prisoners.5

On October 20, the night before he left Cabanatuan, he listened to the secret radio and heard the exciting news that the Americans had invaded the island of Leyte in the middle of the Philippines archipelago.

Late in the afternoon, when the attacks petered out, Wada ordered Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz and several other American physicians up to the deck to care for wounded Japanese. They found the passenger areas slicked with rivulets of blood, bodies, and parts of bodies, including a baby that had been shattered by a .50-caliber round. “The ship’s salon was packed with dead and dying Japanese troops, women and children,” a shaken Schwartz recalled. “Medical supplies . . . were meager, and as soon as darkness set in we were forced to discontinue our work because there

The planes pummeled it with rockets, machine-gun fire, and bombs. One of the bombs scored a direct hit on the aft hold, killing at least one hundred Americans. “I remember the big yellow flash and the hot blast of the explosion,” one survivor later recalled. “The slop buckets burst and there was excrement all over the bodies.”

One of them later commented sadly, “Death meant nothing to us. If you made it, you made it. If not, you died.” The undertakers dragged the naked corpses up ladders, onto the deck, and, sometimes with no fanfare, dumped them overboard.

About 550 survivors had made it to Japan out of the original 1,619 who had left Manila six weeks earlier. Another 110 died within a month. Many of the others barely had the strength to stay on their feet. Japanese authorities at Moji were aghast at their appearance. Under their supervision, the prisoners were marched onto the deck, into the icy cold, given Imperial Army clothing, and then herded off the ship into a theater.

Holland Smith suggested landing as many troops as possible before the exit of Turner’s ships. “My policy regarding reserves is that it always is better to get them on the beach rather than have them sitting out at sea on ships,” he later wrote. Indeed, aboard ships they remained uncomfortable, marginalized, always vulnerable to enemy air or sea attacks. Onshore, they were in their true element as ground combat troops.

All this, of course, served as preamble for the Battle of the Philippine Sea, fought primarily on June 19–20, when Spruance’s forces destroyed at least 426 Imperial Navy planes, nearly annihilating the enemy’s aviation arm, and sank two of Japan’s major carriers plus one light carrier, a one-sided victory that eliminated any possibility that the Japanese might reinforce their beleaguered Mariana garrisons.

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, the Imperial Army general who more than anyone else had led Japan into war, and whose bespectacled visage represented to the American public the embodiment of aggressive Japanese militarism, sent a fiery message to the Saipan garrison: “Because the fate of the Japanese empire depends on the result of your operation, inspire the spirit of the officers and men and to the very end continue to destroy the enemy gallantly and persistently, thus alleviate the anxiety of our Emperor.” Emperor Hirohito himself chimed in with his own blunt message. “You must hold Saipan.”

With Saipan’s key objective now in American hands and Spruance’s Fifth Fleet in the process of inflicting a devastating defeat on the Imperial Navy, the Japanese were ensnared in serious strategic dire straits. Even so, their courageous commitment to fight ferociously to the death and inflict heavy casualties upon the Americans remained a potent asset.

The Japanese may have been disjointed, desperate, and ultimately doomed, but they made excellent use of the terrain, and fought to the death, proving the enduring lesson that, in modern war, committed defenders ensconced in good defensive ground can wreak havoc on a superior attacking force. “Visibility was no more than a few yards in any direction,” Captain Love, an eyewitness to the fighting, wrote. “The Japanese had prepared positions and tremendous firepower. A gain of a few feet was an accomplishment.” In the thick brush or amid the boulders—“bigger than car tires,”

Given Time’s mass national circulation, Sherrod had basically told the entire American public that the 27th was guilty of cowardice

Not surprisingly, the piece provoked a firestorm of controversy. At Esperitu Santo, where the 27th Division survivors were recuperating from the Saipan fighting, the article exploded among the ranks like some sort of literary nuclear bomb. “The Sherrod article hurt and stung them,” Sergeant John Thorburn wrote to Ralph Smith of the pain the men felt when they read the piece. “With a few biased, nasty words he cut into their very hearts.”

censorship rules before publishing the article. The chief of naval operations saw no issue with Griner sending the letter to Time—he took no position on its publication, since that probably remained out of his control—but he had little stomach for urging Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to issue an exculpatory statement. In King’s view, this would publicly undercut Holland Smith and validate what King considered to be biased findings against the general by the Buckner Board.

asset to Eisenhower. In the privacy of senior officer correspondence, numerous Army generals expressed their lack of confidence in Holland Smith and strongly recommended that he never again be allowed to command Army troops.

With Nimitz’s enthusiastic consent, Holland Smith was essentially kicked upstairs, promoted to command of the Fleet Marine Force, a largely administrative post that kept him from leading troops in the field. The new job was ironically similar to that of Smith’s archnemesis and alter ego Richardson. Smith could not help but feel angry about his backhanded promotion. “Good God, I work my heart out, clean up the Marianas in good style, and all I get is—Crap!” he lamented in a letter to Vandegrift.